Best movies like The Big House
Timely! Tremendous! Thrilling! Drama of Love and a Jail-Break!
A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like The Big House Starring Chester Morris, Wallace Beery, Lewis Stone, Robert Montgomery, and more. If you liked The Big House then you may also like: 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, Unchained, Over the Wall, Jail House Blues, Key Witness and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.
Convicted of manslaughter for a drunken driving accident, Kent Marlowe is sent to prison, where he meets vicious incarcerated figures who are planning an escape from the brutal conditions.
The Big House
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Unchained
This fact-based prison drama tells the tale of a band of prisoners living in the innovative 2,600-acre prison at Chino, California. The place takes a humanistic approach to reform and there are no armed guards, no lockups and no uniforms. The underlying philosophy is that if these things are not there, the prisoners will not want to escape, and will instead accept their punishment. A new inmate arrives and soon accustoms himself to the new idea. The story includes the Oscar nominated song Unchained Melody.
Over the Wall
When a singing, song-writing prizefighter is framed for murder and sent to the state pen, his girlfriend sets out to prove his innocence.
Jail House Blues
A prisoner about to be pardoned puts it off until he can put on one last variety show for his fellow inmates.
Key Witness
A man takes over the identity of a dead man while on the lam from a crime he didn't commit.
Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye
Ralph Cotter, a ruthless criminal, escapes violently from a farm prison. Then, he seduces a dead inmate’s sister, gets back quickly into the crime business, faces corrupt local cops who run the city’s underworld and meets a powerful tycoon’s whimsical daughter.
Against the Wall
In 1971, a warden at Attica Penitentiary is caught up in a hostage crisis when inmates take over the prison to demand better living conditions.
Animal Factory
Suburbanite Ron is spoiled, young and not overly worried about the marijuana charges leveled against him. But, after being made out to be a drug dealer, he faces a five-year jail sentence in San Quentin State Prison. Physically frail and unaccustomed to his rough surroundings, Ron is primed to fall victim to sexual predators and bullying guards – that is, until he's befriended by Earl, a veteran inmate who finds meaning in protecting the vulnerable new kid.
The Big Shot
Duke Berne, former big shot but now a three-time loser, fears returning to crime because a fourth conviction will mean a life sentence. Finally, haunted by his past and goaded by his cohorts, he joins in planning an armoured car robbery.
Corrective Measures
Set in San Tiburon, the world's most dangerous maximum-security penitentiary and home to the world's most treacherous superpowered criminals, where tensions among the inmates and staff heighten, leading to anarchy that engulfs the prison and order is turned upside down.
Avengement
While on a prison furlough, a lowly criminal evades his guards and returns to his old stomping ground to take revenge on the people who turned him into a cold blooded killer.
Each Dawn I Die
A corrupt D.A. with governatorial ambitions is annoyed by an investigative reporter's criticism of his criminal activities and decides to frame the reporter for manslaughter in order to silence him.
The Escapist
Frank Perry is an institutionalized convict twelve years into a life sentence without parole. When his estranged daughter falls ill, he is determined to make peace with her before it's too late. He develops an ingenious escape plan, and recruits a dysfunctional band of escapists - misfits with a mutual dislike for one other but united by their desire to escape their hell hole of an existence.
Greenfingers
Clive Owen stars as a prison inmate who goes into an experimental "open" prison where the inmates walk around freely and get job training for their impending releases. While there, he discovers he has a talent for growing flowers. His talent is recognized by a gardening guru who encourages him and four other inmates to enter a national gardening competition
The Mustang
While participating in a rehabilitation program training wild mustangs, a convict at first struggles to connect with the horses and his fellow inmates, but he learns to confront his violent past as he soothes an especially feisty horse.
The Poppy Girl's Husband
A silent romantic love triangle crime melodrama about a man who gets out of prison after ten years and discovers that his wife has divorced him and married the man who sent him to prison. Worse yet, she fears he will want to exact revenge, so she sets up her new husband to frame her first husband, so he will be sent back to prison!
School for Girls
After being convicted of stealing some jewels, Annette Eldrige is sent to a reformatory administered by a sadistic and corrupt female warder. However, one of the board of trustees takes an interest in the new arrival and begins to investigate the management of the institution.
Canon City
Prisoners battle each other -- and the police -- when they escape the Colorado State Penitentiary.
Women in Prison
The superintendent of a women's prison is pressured to pardon a member of a criminal gang. When she refuses, her daughter is framed on a manslaughter charge and sent to prison.
Seven Miles from Alcatraz
After Pearl Harbor, convicts at Alcatraz prison live in fear of bomb attacks, driving Champ Larkin and his pal Jimbo to a desperate escape attempt which lands them on a tiny lighthouse island, where they take over. The five inhabitants are stymied in their efforts to summon aid. But the island also figures in the schemes of a big Nazi spy ring; which will win out, the gangsters' greed or their patriotism?
Crazy on the Outside
A recently paroled ex-con who has trouble adjusting to the wacky normalcy of life outside of prison. He has spent the last three years behind bars after getting caught committing a crime and taking the rap for his much more dangerous pal.
Duffy of San Quentin
San Quentin's new warden crusades for reform and for a framed inmate who loves a nurse.
I Went Down
Fresh out of prison, Git rescues a former best friend (now living with Git's girlfriend) from a beating at the hands of loan sharks. He's now in trouble with the mob boss, Tom French, who sends Git to Cork with another debtor, Bunny Kelly, to find a guy named Frank Grogan, and take him to a man with a friendly face at a shack across a bog. It's a tougher assignment than it seems: Git's a novice, Bunny's prone to rash acts, Frank doesn't want to be found (and once he's found, he has no money), and maybe Tom's planning to murder Frank, which puts Git in a moral dilemma. Then, there's the long-ago disappearance of Sonny Mulligan. What's a decent and stand-up lad to do?
The Criminal
When a robbery at a racetrack goes wrong ex-con Johnny Bannion is caught and sent back to prison. He won't tell the rest of the gang where he has stashed the loot leading to violent consequences.
Alias Jimmy Valentine
The saga of Alias Jimmy Valentine began with the O. Henry story "A Retrieved Reformation". This surprise-ending tale was adapted into a stage play by Paul Armstrong, which subsequently was adapted to film several times
The Mad Game
Bootlegger Ed Carson is sent to prison. His old gang turns from liquor (now legal) to kidnapping. When they nab the son and daughter-in-law of the judge who sent Carson to prison, he is paroled to help in the capture.
House of Women
An innocent, pregnant prison inmate (Shirley Knight) becomes the bad warden's (Andrew Duggan) personal favorite.
The Pursuit of Happiness
William Popper is the son of a stockbroker and is thoroughly disenchanted with "the system." So much so that even though he can prove that he ran over a woman in his car entirely by accident, he accepts a sentence for manslaughter.
Convicts 4
After his death sentence is commuted to life in prison, John Resko is transferred from Sing-Sing to Dannemora where, with the help of a humane prison guard, he becomes a rehabilitated man and a successful painter.
Lethal Love Triangle
Two students become engrossed with their handsome research subject until his true nature puts them in harm's way.
Buried Alive
A prison trustee rescues a despondent executioner from a bar-room brawl, and is blamed for the fight by a tabloid reporter who actually started it, and loses parole, becomes embittered, and gets blamed for murder of guard.
Men Without Souls
A prison chaplain (John Litel) rescues a young convict (Glenn Ford) on a misguided mission of revenge.
Roger Touhy, Gangster
Set during Prohibition, the movie centers on Touhy's rise from small time thug to the city's most powerful bootlegger whose empire is rivaled only by that of Al Capone (who is referred to, but never named in the story). It is his rival who frames Touhy for kidnapping and arranges for him to serve a life-long term in Stateville prison. Determined to be free again, the desperate Touhy and his cellmate Basil "the Owl" Banghart, begin plotting a violent break out.
Prison Break
Story of a tuna fisherman who has been wrongfully convicted of a murder he did not commit. His exemplary behavior in prison ensures that he is up for early parole. He realizes, however, that his movements will be limited, and he will be unable to join and wed his beloved. The only solution is to escape and hunt down the real killer, himself.
Convict's Code
On parole after three years in prison, a football player (Robert Kent) encounters the man (Sidney Blackmer) who framed him.
They All Come Out
A down on his luck young man stumbles into a gang of robbers who all get landed in prison. Will he be reformed, or is he ensnared into a life of crime?
Public Hero Number 1
G-Man Jeff Crane poses as a crook to infiltrate the notorious Purple Gang, a band of hoodlums which preys upon other hoodlums. Orchestrating the jailbreak of the gang's leader, Crane joins him in a Dillinger-like flight across the country.
Blind Injustice
A blind woman finds herself the target of an attacker again after the person originally convicted of her rape is found to be innocent of the crime.
Prison Nurse
A state prison is threatened by approaching floods, an epidemic of typhoid fever breaks out among the inmates, the prison's only doctor falls sick, there are only three nurses to administer vaccines and take care of stricken patients--and a group of prisoners is planning to use the chaos as a cover for a mass escape.
Shadows of Sing Sing
Muriel Rossi (Mary Brian), the sister of a racketeer, Al Rossi (Harry Woods), falls in love with Bob Martel (Bruce Cabot), the son of a police detective, Joe Martel (Grant Mitchell). Their love affair causes bot families problems when Bob is framed, but saved as a result of his father's access to police department films.
Convicted of manslaughter for a drunken driving accident, Kent Marlowe is sent to prison, where he meets vicious incarcerated figures who are planning an escape from the brutal conditions.
The Big House
A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like The Big House Starring Chester Morris, Wallace Beery, Lewis Stone, Robert Montgomery, and more. If you liked The Big House then you may also like: 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, Unchained, Over the Wall, Jail House Blues, Key Witness and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.
20,000 Years in Sing Sing
Brash hoodlum Tom Connors enters Sing Sing cocksure of himself and disrespectful toward authority, but his tough but compassionate warden changes him.